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Take This GUI and Shove It
snydeq writes "Deep End's Paul Venezia speaks out against the overemphasis on GUIs in today's admin tools, saying that GUIs are fine and necessary in many cases, but only after a complete CLI is in place, and that they cannot interfere with the use of the CLI, only complement it. Otherwise, the GUI simply makes easy things easy and hard things much harder. He writes, 'If you have to make significant, identical changes to a bunch of Linux servers, is it easier to log into them one-by-one and run through a GUI or text-menu tool, or write a quick shell script that hits each box and either makes the changes or simply pulls down a few new config files and restarts some services? And it's not just about conservation of effort — it's also about accuracy. If you write a script, you're certain that the changes made will be identical on each box. If you're doing them all by hand, you aren't.'"
Why use Win2K8 for a domain/active directory when you can use Samba4 instead?
http://wiki.samba.org/index.php/Samba4
Advantages:
* Fully scriptable
* Easy to back up and duplicate to backup server
* Backups are easy to restore
* Better, more complete logging
* Easy to administer remotely
* Easy to make self-healing with nagios
* No server license + client access license (no nickel-and-diming) and no worrying about whether to choose per-user or per-device
* disaster recovery is easy to be made 100% successful and repeatable in your staging environment - using BSD userland tools, not having to spend thousands to tens of thousands on buggy proprietary solutions
* It requires a sysadmin with a clue, which greatly increases your chances of continual uptime and avoiding the need for disaster recovery in the first place
* Easy to cluster without having to pay for an expensive "enterprise edition" of Windows
* Inexpensive to replicate to your staging environment - legally avoiding have to pay for additional server license for the one-time-use software
Disadvantages:
* You need to not be a mouth-breather to configure it (your average drooling paper-MCSE with no experience need not apply)
* The documentation sucks
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
Yes, yes it is.
Most people on slashdot who actually use Windows are mindlessly clinking to the clunker than is XP, so they really have no idea of what Microsoft has done in the last 10 years.
I am afraid you are mistaken.
Most people on slashdot are clinging onto Windows '9x, and have no idea what Microsoft have accomplished in the past 12-15 years.
Having said that, I once administered a network of Win'9x machines, so I can thoroughly understand why they'd run away screaming in the opposite direction. But at least I'm aware that Microsoft have made some advances since then.
Probably Debian would have been OK, but I was finding admin of most Linux distros a pain for exactly these reasons. I couldn't find a layer where I could do everything that I needed to do without worrying about one thing stepping on another.
You should've gone with Debian. Unlike Debian, FreeBSD will walk all over you when it comes to upgrading your ports. You have 'multiple layers' of software.
freebsd-upgrade is nice, but unfortunately it only does GENERIC. Guess what? GENERIC sucks, so unless you can 'get by' with the support it provides you're going to have to be doing kernel upgrades manually, too.
The best way to upgrade ports in FreeBSD is to not have to.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers